In 1979, Edward Said was invited by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir to France for a conference on Middle East peace. It was in the wake of the Camp David Accords that ended the war between Egypt and Israel, that the author of “Orientalism” and ardent supporter of the Palestinian people, was invited to contribute with other prominent thinkers.

Entitled “Do We Enjoy Being Free?” this episode discusses Sartre’s work on free will and bad faith. For Sartre, we often try to negate our own free will by relegating decisions to outside forces beyond our control.

Existentialism is a field of philosophy that grapples with human existence and flourished in post-war Europe in the 1940s and 1950s.

Of course, these thinkers of human existence were also dealing with their own. Namely, that their lives were a bizarre shit-storm of mental breakdowns, drug-induced genius and tremendous backlash from the societies they lived in.